“Now Everything Is Money”: Social Difference and Value in the Southern Andes

Abstract

This article examines a variety of discourses on money and value originating in the Lares Valley of Cusco, Peru, among local leaders fighting to revitalize a nonmonetary exchange system called chalakuy. The expansion of financial money into the countryside has imbued chalakuy with a newfound political urgency whereby Andean ideas of reciprocity are mobilized as a counter to national currency. While currency is occasionally used in the communities that I describe, the flows are limited to certain contexts, and Peruvian bureaucrats who visit the valley misinterpret how and why money behaves differently at the local level. This ethnography presents an opportunity to consider how exchange systems rely on historically specific discourses and argues for a careful attentiveness to the distinct value systems of social and financial money.